25 in the Riverland visiting cousins and was going to Mildura to buy her husband an aquarium. When I asked whether there was a pet store in Broken Hill she told me that she would catch the fish from a lake in the local park. Tom the old toothless woodcutter gave me a lift ‘just down the road’ to a highway rest area in the middle of nowhere (he was working nearby), had a tiny Scottish Terrier puppy in his ute and laughed uproariously with a deep chesty guffaw after every sentence as if it were the funniest thing in the world. There were times when I thought that I wouldn’t make it; I waited for hours by that rest area in the middle of nowhere on the windswept Hay Plains. During the day it was dry and hot, and populated with unusually
persistent flies. After night fell it turned bitterly cold and I had to sleep in a onesie inside my sleeping bag to stay warm. I was as far as possible from any city, and I knew that trying to get back to Adelaide would be just as futile as pressing onwards. The next morning a ute sped past, and the driver having evidently decided to take pity, pulled a handbrake turn in front of truck to come back and get me. My doubts about this ride grew when the passenger door opened and half a dozen empty XXXX cans rolled out, dozens more littering the cab and a pitbull leered at me from a cage in the back. I knew I had no choice though; I had to get out of that place. The driver and his tattoo covered passenger were shearers on their
way from Coober Pedy to Hay. They were already 20 hours and a case of beer into their roadtrip/ bender. When we stopped at the next town to buy more beers I offered to take over the driving and we balled our way along the highway in the hot country NSW sun, sharing cones and having singalongs to Urban Classics Volume III. Between Hay and Dubbo, I got a glimse into the secret solitary life of a truckie; how to cook homemade calzone while simultaneously driving a 90 tonne vehicle; the danger that an echidna poses to truck tyres; and the benefits of a meal replacement milkshake and No-Doz diet versus greasy road house meals. Once you befriend a truckie, hitchhiking becomes a breeze. We pulled into a truckstop in Dubbo after dark and my new best mate asked over the UHF radio whether anyone going towards the Gold Coast the next day would like a passenger. I got a ride to Brisbane in a meat truck which swayed back and forward at traffic lights with the inertia of tonnes of cattle carcasses hanging from the trailer roof. The driver’s dad was going from Brisbane to the Gold Coast the same evening so I got a lift on the final leg of my journey without even trying. As the obscenely tall glittering